In Twelve Thirty, getting fucked by a bright-eyed college kid proves a bonding experience for one Iowa family. In the aftermath of three wildly different sexual encounters with twentysomething Jeff (Jonathan Groff), spunky Mel (Portia Reiners), her morose sister, Maura (Mamie Gummer), and the pairs mom, Vivien (Karen Young), re-establish a measure of interfamilial intimacyboth with each other and with the latters gay ex-husband. Sexuality runs from the thrillingly casual to the squeamishly disagreeable in Jeff Lipskys film, but mostly screwinglike trust, love, and happinessbecomes the stuff of ceaseless conversation. Essentially a series of verbal pas de deux, the film pairs off its six characters (Mauras Satanist friend completes the sextet) in various arrangements for chats by turns aggressive and stutteringly awkward. These exchanges have an echo-chamber feel to them, as if theyre cut off from both the outside world and the way actual people talk, but realism is clearly not what Lipsky is after. Instead, he crafts an odd self-contained universe in which the characters compulsive need to explain themselves or simply hold their interlocutors attention stands in for the meaning of the words they actually say, resulting in a film more satisfying in occasional isolated moments than as a coherent dramatic entity.
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